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  • The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye by Brian Russell Graham
  • Joseph Adamson (bio)
Brian Russell Graham. The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press. xvi, 144. $45.00

Brian Graham’s The Necessary Unity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye is a stimulating and valuable contribution to Frye studies. His thesis is that Frye’s thinking process was fundamentally dialectical, building as it does on the paradoxical tension between opposing claims or tendencies – the conservative and the revolutionary, the aesthetic (beauty) and the prophetic (truth), work and leisure, freedom and equality, belief and vision – and transcending those poles to reach a more comprehensive [End Page 562] and expansive vantage point. The impact of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, even after a half century, has tended to overshadow the equally fascinating insights of his later work. For the most part Graham provides a corrective to this neglect, having assimilated much of Frye’s voluminous later work into his argument, at least up until The Great Code. Much of this writing, besides expanding and elaborating on the overflowing insights in literary criticism made in Anatomy, is focused on exploring questions concerning the social function of literature, education, and the arts and sciences. This intellectual adventure is by no means confined to the published work but runs through the notebooks, where the sense of inquiry is much more speculative and open-ended.

Graham is very good at teasing out the originality of Frye’s understanding of the social function and vision of literature, and he throws considerable light on the tension between the secular and the spiritual that informs his work. He is a reliable explicator of Frye’s ideas, and there is an admirable clarity and perspicuousness in his presentation of them. However, there are serious lacunae. There is a virtually complete disregard of Words with Power, Frye’s last major work. This is not a minor oversight but a large and inexplicable one in light of the subject matter of Graham’s study. More generally, given Graham’s interest in the way in which Frye reconciles the claims of beauty and truth, or aesthetic and existential concerns, it is more than curious that he should have ignored the development, spanning a quarter century, of Frye’s ongoing interest in the idea of concern, beginning with The Critical Path and culminating in the discussion of primary and secondary concerns in Words with Power. During this period Frye turned to the way in which literature engages, in metaphor and story, the most essential and universal needs of human beings. Frye’s discussion of what he came to identify as primary concerns (food, sex, freedom, and property) runs through the Late Notebooks and is the linchpin of his organization of the four varieties of symbolism to which he devotes the last four chapters of Words. During the same period Frye began to wrestle with the concept of kerygma, a mode of language, addressed in both The Great Code and Words, which dialectically supersedes the imaginative and ushers in the meta-literary dimension of verbal culture. There is, astonishingly, no mention of the concept in Graham’s book. Yet it is here that Frye most fully addresses the prophetic, existential, and social dimension of literature and its spiritual ‘beyond.’ Missing as well is any mention of what is perhaps Frye’s most explicit use of dialectic, the presentation, in the first four chapters of Words, of the five modes of language: descriptive, logical, rhetorical, imaginative, kerygmatic. It is here that he employs the concept of an ‘excluded initiative’ which determines the way in which each mode necessarily leads to the ascendency of an antithetical and suppressed stage of language that succeeds it, a process [End Page 563] that hearkens back to the narrative and symbolic modes explored in the first two essays of Anatomy.

The book is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Frye’s work. It does much to clarify an unjustly neglected dimension of his thought. But it frustrates in its absence of attention to key concepts in his writings, concepts indispensable to the...

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